BRICSCAD - support for ATI Radeon HD 4870

Žiga Lausegger

Hello, 

even after installing ATI catalyst + ATI drivers sometimes menu in Bricscad isn't shown. Allso I cant rotate the camera which seems like a weird graphics glitch. Is my video card (Radeon HD 4870) even supported?

If not, what other card would you recommend?

Kind regards!

Žiga Lausegger

 I hate to do this. BUMP! 

Brian Marr

Are you still using Arch ? You probably should be using something else - a distro that Bricscad will support. I use OpenSuse but there are others.

Žiga Lausegger

 I will always use Arch. Would rather give up on BricsCAD than leave Arch. I mean Arch experts are really good and BricsCAD would benefit if they ported the program for Arch as well.

Knut Hohenberg

What makes you think that your problems are caused by differences between Arch linux and supported distros?
I may be naive, but my bet is that BricsCAD will run on any recent distro, as long as you make sure all dependencies are met.
To me it seems that problems in the graphics stack are more likely to be the result of patchy support from redway's side  (their GPU list doesn't even mention linux).
But Bricsys really could do more in trying to gather and publish data on which hardware/driver combinations do work and which do not.

Brian Marr

@Knut Hohenberg:

What makes you think that your problems are caused by differences between Arch linux and supported distros?
I may be naive, but my bet is that BricsCAD will run on any recent distro, as long as you make sure all dependencies are met.
To me it seems that problems in the graphics stack are more likely to be the result of patchy support from redway's side  (their GPU list doesn't even mention linux).
But Bricsys really could do more in trying to gather and publish data on which hardware/driver combinations do work and which do not.

Realistically I am not sure this can happen, based upon developer manpower and income Bricscad gets from Linux. To get any serious drafting done you have to have a solid supported platform, that is going to work without much fuss. Alternatively, if you can afford to tinker, then yes other distros including Arch may be able to run Bricscad.

Žiga Lausegger

@Knut Hohenberg:

What makes you think that your problems are caused by differences between Arch linux and supported distros?
I may be naive, but my bet is that BricsCAD will run on any recent distro, as long as you make sure all dependencies are met. 

Well on Arch Linux it is impossible to install a program if you don't install all the dependancies first. Dependancies can be seen from PKGBUILD under section "depends=(,,...)". I clearly satisfied those and Bricscad installed. But I am having problems with flickering workspace and main menu which doesnt even appear. It must be a BricsCAD which is doing this. 

Does anyone have any sugestions on how to fix any of those? 

Žiga Lausegger

 I solved my problem with menus by starting Bricscad with root priviliges. I started it using "sudo ./bricscad.sh". Because I installed Bricscad in "/opt/bricscad" where users have no privileges, Bricscad wasn't allowed to load menus if started by user. But if we start it as a super user using "sudo" comand, we give Bricscad all the privileges it needs in folder "/opt/bricscad". 

It is possible not to use "sudo" command but we would need to install Bricscad somewhere inside the home folder for the user that wants to use it. This took me quite some time to figure out. I really don't know why hehehe.

I still haven't managed to fix my problems concerning my GPU and flickering...

Tomas Polak

Hi Ziga,
from what I gathered, the best experience you can get with any CAD software is with NVIDIA cards. I didn't have any problems (concerning drivers or hardware) during testing my system with NVIDIA card using closed source driver. I read that Redway started to support AMD cards only recently (2009 I think), so it might be not so optimized as NVIDIA yet.
Redway supports AMD and NVIDIA cards on Linux, but as mentioned above, there is no list of supported cards on their web page for linux. There's only windows list.

Just out of curiosity: did you try running Bricscad on radeon FOSS driver? Did it work?

Žiga Lausegger

@Tom Polak:

Hi Ziga,
from what I gathered, the best experience you can get with any CAD software is with NVIDIA cards. I didn't have any problems (concerning drivers or hardware) during testing my system with NVIDIA card using closed source driver. I read that Redway started to support AMD cards only recently (2009 I think), so it might be not so optimized as NVIDIA yet.
Redway supports AMD and NVIDIA cards on Linux, but as mentioned above, there is no list of supported cards on their web page for linux. There's only windows list.

Just out of curiosity: did you try running Bricscad on radeon FOSS driver? Did it work?

I have heard about NVIDIA Quadro series yes. But NVIDIA is known for bad Linux drivers. Even Linus Torvalds dedicated them a middle finger in a video not so long ago. I would rather go with ATI FireGL or FirePro GPUs... I think that these should be supported by Bricscad.

Knut Hohenberg

Hello Ziga,
I think there is absolutely no evidence that expensive CAD graphics cards will do any better than the consumer ones in this case. But did you check whether your problems are really OpenGL-related? Are they independent of the view mode, or are they worse in either the non-accelerated (e.g. 2d-wireframe) or the accelerated modes (e.g. modeling)?
Do different GLSWAPMODE settings produce any effect?

Tomas Polak

@ziga lausegger:

I have heard about NVIDIA Quadro series yes. But NVIDIA is known for bad Linux drivers. Even Linus Torvalds dedicated them a middle finger in a video not so long ago. I would rather go with ATI FireGL or FirePro GPUs... I think that these should be supported by Bricscad.

Oh, I was not talking about the professional lines of cards (Quadros and FirePros). As Knut said, I don't think it's worth spending the money to use them under linux. I am using standard GeForce line card (and pretty old one - 8600M GS).

Žiga Lausegger

@Knut Hohenberg:

Hello Ziga,
I think there is absolutely no evidence that expensive CAD graphics cards will do any better than the consumer ones in this case. But did you check whether your problems are really OpenGL-related? Are they independent of the view mode, or are they worse in either the non-accelerated (e.g. 2d-wireframe) or the accelerated modes (e.g. modeling)?
Do different GLSWAPMODE settings produce any effect?

I will dig into this and try to get some results. Will report back as soon as I have some time. 

Žiga Lausegger

 I have to express myself. Bricscad ROCX! With new update 14.2.18 (x64) the graphic glitches with my ATI card are completely gone. But I am not using propietary drivers on Archlinux.

Žiga Lausegger

@ziga lausegger:

 I have to express myself. Bricscad ROCX! With new update 14.2.18 (x64) the graphic glitches with my ATI card are completely gone. But I am not using propietary drivers on Archlinux.

If I use propietary drivers Bricscad will crash once I open new 2D/3D drawing. 

Tomas Polak

@ziga lausegger:

If I use propietary drivers Bricscad will crash once I open new 2D/3D drawing. 

Thanks for the update.
It's quite interesting that BricsCAD works with open-source AMD driver and not with proprietary. Did you try one of the 3D accelerated modes with the open source drivers? Or are you just using software rendering fallback mode for 3D visual styles?

Tom

Žiga Lausegger

@Tom Polak:

Thanks for the update.
It's quite interesting that BricsCAD works with open-source AMD driver and not with proprietary. Did you try one of the 3D accelerated modes with the open source drivers? Or are you just using software rendering fallback mode for 3D visual styles?

Tom

You mean model, realistic, wireframe, sketch etc.??? These modes work with open-source drivers yes. But not even one mode works with propietary drivers...

Tomas Polak

@ziga lausegger:

You mean model, realistic, wireframe, sketch etc.??? These modes work with open-source drivers yes. But not even one mode works with propietary drivers...

Yes, I mean those. Thanks for the information.

Tom

Mikael Nordvall

Hi,

At OpenStudio arkitekter (openstudio.se) we are using the AMD series of APUs (eg Radeon HD 7660D) with our mITX workstations. Our systems are Ubuntu-LTS-based (openstudio.se/desktop), because we want a slow release cycle on the company workstations in order to maximize stability, but I have previously used BricsCAD with Arch as well with good results. I liked the Arch way very much, but the fact that the systems sometimes require hands on fixing/config for everything to work after upgrades made it a no-go for our company workstations.

We are using the proprietary catalyst display driver, and 3D acceleration works fine with our APUs, just like it did on my previous workstation with Radeon HD 6770 GPU, the workstation I used before that with Nvidia graphics and even on my eeepc with a C-50 APU (don't remember the name of the graphics chip on that one).

The statement that "it generally works better with Nvidia" is simply not true. I used Nvidia before, but AMD apu series are like tailor made for Architects; Powerful enough for heavy construction work and the compact format makes it possible to slip a mini-workstation (M350 case from mini-itx.se) into my briefcase.

Regards
/Mikael

Žiga Lausegger

@Mikael Nordvall:

Hi,

At OpenStudio arkitekter (openstudio.se) we are using the AMD series of APUs (eg Radeon HD 7660D) with our mITX workstations. Our systems are Ubuntu-LTS-based (openstudio.se/desktop), because we want a slow release cycle on the company workstations in order to maximize stability, but I have previously used BricsCAD with Arch as well with good results. I liked the Arch way very much, but the fact that the systems sometimes require hands on fixing/config for everything to work after upgrades made it a no-go for our company workstations.

We are using the proprietary catalyst display driver, and 3D acceleration works fine with our APUs, just like it did on my previous workstation with Radeon HD 6770 GPU, the workstation I used before that with Nvidia graphics and even on my eeepc with a C-50 APU (don't remember the name of the graphics chip on that one).

The statement that "it generally works better with Nvidia" is simply not true. I used Nvidia before, but AMD apu series are like tailor made for Architects; Powerful enough for heavy construction work and the compact format makes it possible to slip a mini-workstation (M350 case from mini-itx.se) into my briefcase.

Regards
/Mikael

Thank you for the info on ATI Radeon 6770 & 7660. I am thinking of buying a nwe GPU.

Tomas Polak

It's good to hear BricsCAD working without problems on both FOSS drivers and Catalyst.

Tom